A team at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has found the largest recorded black hole, one that swallows an unprecedented amount of its home galaxy, potentially requiring a rethink in our understanding of galactic formation.
The huge hole has been spotted in the heart of the disk system NGC 1277, a smallish galaxy about …

Re: The bloody egg

But the chicken and egg scenario does not just relate to that single first chicken.

You said that a chicken like bird laid the egg so it came first. Well, was this bird born or from an egg? The precursor to this bird, was that born or from an egg. Keep going. That is what it refers to.

You make a great point regarding the galaxies though. Were black holes there from the bang or were they formed. Perhaps they even both occurred at the same time.

but its not black: definately mostly orange, with a white bit in the middle

Result of galaxy collision?

What if two smaller galaxies rotating in the same plane collided with each other? Couldn't that mutually feed a lot of mass into the black holes at each other's centres before coalescing into one galaxy?

Re: Result of galaxy collision?

Maybe something like that. You have to kill a lot of angular momentum so that most of the galaxies' matter can fall into the centre. Maybe two contra-rotating galaxies with nearly equal but opposite angular momentum approaching each other very slowly (relatively speaking) down a common axis of rotation, leading to a merged one with almost no angular momentum?

I imagine that the astronomers are busy running lots of simulations, trying to work out how it happened, or whether it's physically impossible (under current accepted physics) rather than merely unlikely. The biggest anything is almost always unlikely. and there are a LOT of observable galaxies.

Supposedly

Re: Supposedly

Someone remind me... once you're beyond the event horizon you can never get back but does that also mean you can't escape getting closer and closer, or could you enter into orbit of the singularity inside the EH?

That guys' pic...

No! Bad! BAD REG!

"17 billion times the size of Sun" should evidently read "17 billion times the mass of Sun".

The SIZE of black hole can be conveniently (but only approximately) described with the Schwarzschild radius (which, amazingly, depends linearly on the mass, instead of, you know, only on the cube root of the mass).

Re: Dark Matter

Well, it's hard to calculate the mass-density of the observable universe exactly, but it's in a very narrow band of all the possibilities. Slightly higher, and the universe would have collapsed back into a singularity (or at least a very small very hot entity) so long ago, that planets and life could never have formed. Slightly lower, and the universe would have expanded so far and so fast that there would be no stars, galaxies, planets or life, just a very thin soup of particles very close to absolute zero.

Hence to the weak antrhopic principle (for atheists) or the hand of $DEITY (for the religious).

Black holes betray their presence by their gravitational influence on the things around them. It's doubtless the odd nature of this galaxy that lets us deduce that the black hole at its centre is a monster, just as "ordinary" galaxies let us deduce the presence of an "ordinary" galactic-centre-sized black hole. So unless monster black holes can be lurking all alone in intergalactic voids (how?), they can't be the dark matter we are looking for. And anyway, we need a dark matter halo to make gravitationally bound galaxies work at all, and then there's the Bullet galaxy where two galaxies have collided head-on and one can observe the separation of the formerly-associated dark matter.

Biggest != Typical

Shouldn't one always expect the biggest of anything to be an outlier, an anomaly, a bit of a freak? Unless it's difficult to concoct any scenario leading to the formation of this monster, one should surely assume that the observable universe is large enough for even very unlikely things to have happened somewhere.

And of course, the biggest is also the one shouting loudest for our attention. (Well, apart from Gamma-ray bursts, whatever they may be! )

Not Einstein Again...

Goofballs don't even know what gravity is or why it works. It acts instantaneously across the Universe. None of that speed of light throttling, not for our bellicose "gravitons", no sir. Einstein kludges up the "fabric of space-time" fairy tale and the number crunchers go into a century long phlogiston orgasm making John Holmes look like a cross-eyed hamster by comparison. WE ARE the "black hole" and the grant funded cardinals and bishops are working us like a twenty dollar convention hooker.